Absent Hearts

A third of the students at Fountain–Fort Carson High School have parents in the military; as a result, even football games are played in Iraq’s shadow. For this small Colorado town, the war is not a political issue but a series of missed graduations, missed birthdays, and lonely nights.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,107 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following American yesterday: BATTLES, Michael Sr., 38; Sgt., Army; San Antonio; 1st Cavalry Division. —The New York Times, October 31, 2004.

As Charlie Paddock stood on the field in the clear Colorado night in late October and saw all those people standing, the feelings that overwhelmed him had nothing to do with the football game he was about to play.

His team, the Fountain–Fort Carson High School Trojans, was minutes away from the starting kickoff of its last home game of 2004, against the Cheyenne Mountain High School Indians. This season, a classic one of rebuilding, the Trojans had lurched along to a record of two and six, and had no shot at the playoffs. The team was young, and its greenness showed itself in the typical ways: too many penalties, so much trouble early in the season getting into the end zone that it had begun to feel like some sort of twilight zone.

As a senior, Charlie knew the Cheyenne Mountain game would be the last home game of his high-school career. That created plenty of incentive, as did the competition. They were known as the silver-spoon guys, and Fountain–Fort Carson had always been the blue-collar ones.

But none of that really mattered in the moments before game time, when the school’s principal, Jim Calhoun, had asked everyone in the stands with ties to the military to rise. Nearly half of the roughly 2,000 people stood up. Given that Fountain–Fort Carson High School served families from both the town of Fountain and the sprawling army post of Fort Carson, to the west, where roughly 16,000 soldiers were stationed, there was nothing surprising in that; about 35 percent of the 1,237 students had a parent in the active military. But as Charlie looked up into the stands and saw all those faces filled with a mixture of pride and solemnity in the midst of a war with no clear end, the sheer volume moved him in a way he had never quite felt before.

Charlie and his Trojan teammates had knelt in the middle of the field when those in the stands had been asked to rise. So had the Cheyenne Mountain Indians. But now Calhoun asked those players who had a parent in the military to stand. Charlie wasn’t among them; his father and stepmother were teachers in the Fountain school system. But about a dozen teammates stood up. During the summer, word had spread that there would be a new round of deployments to Iraq and the Middle East from Fort Carson over the coming months, close to 7,000 by the time it was through. Not all of those who stood had a parent who would be shipping out to Iraq in the newest round. But some of them did.

Brodie Pigott, a junior who played defensive end, was one of them; his father, Donald, a sergeant first class in the army, was scheduled to leave after the season ended. Junior offensive guard Mike Pritts, who had played all season with a sore shoulder, was another; his dad, Mike, a master sergeant in special operations, would be shipping out as well. So would Antoinette Fisher, the single mother of special-teams player Kenneth Fisher.

This wasn’t the first time Charlie Paddock had felt the impact of the war on his hometown. On the surface, Fountain, with a population of roughly 20,000, about 15 miles south of Colorado Springs, was quintessentially American, with its Wal-Mart at one end of Santa Fe Avenue and Loaf ‘n Jug convenience store at the other, its curlicues of new housing developments spread out below the Rockies, and its Main Street, with a video store and a nail parlor and a shiny new city hall. It was so quintessentially American, in fact, that on the eve of the millennium The New York Times Magazine, after an exhaustive study of thousands of communities, had chosen Fountain as the town more representative of American life than any other in the country. That was before September 11, before America had gone to war.

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In 2003, Charlie had watched defensive end Jerry McWilliams move in with the family of a teammate when his mother, Karen Larsen, was sent to Iraq for a year. He knew about offensive tackle and defensive end Cory York, who had not just one parent overseas during the 2003 season but two—his stepfather, in Baghdad training rookie soldiers in survival in the field, and his mother, in Kuwait doing weapons inventory. He knew that outside the tight realm of the Trojans there were other kids at his high school in similar situations. Like junior Genevieve Hammerle-Clark, whose grandparents had sold their home in Oregon, bought a town house in Fountain, and moved a thousand miles to take care of Genevieve and her younger sister when their mother, Jillian Hammerle, shipped out in March for at least a year. Like junior Charmaine Locklin, racked with guilt over her wish that anyone besides her father, Joel Kempf, who would be doing his second tour—anyone—would go in his place. Hadn’t he already done his time? And why was it that the minute they had gotten used to each other again he was leaving? While she was proud of her father for his service to his country and respected President Bush for the simple reason that he was the president, she wished that she could speak to Bush, let him know the sadness and fear she was feeling, let him see her tears. “He’s the one who is responsible for the hurt I have, the hurt my family has, the hurt my friends have, and the best he can say is that he’s mourning for our soldiers, too. He’ll never feel what we feel.”

The war in Iraq had become a fact of life at Fountain–Fort Carson High School, another kind of American reality—beyond the war of words, beyond the rhetoric of for it or against it, red state versus blue state. It was hardly new to Charlie Paddock. But still, there was something about that moment in Guy R. Barickman Stadium that just got to him. Maybe it was all those people standing in the bleachers paying tribute to honor and duty to country, not simply with lip service but thinking of their potential sacrifice. Maybe it was the night itself, so breezy and beautiful in this valley of southern Colorado—mostly sod and alfalfa fields before the growth spurt that started in the late 80s turned Fountain into a bedroom community for the army post and Colorado Springs. Maybe it was the way the American flag, brought across the middle of the field by the color guard, flapped in the wind. Maybe it was the way his teammates lifted their helmets high when the words “land of the free” were sung during the national anthem. This was a place, conservative and patriotic and steadfast in its support of the president, where the national anthem was always sung with particular gravity. But there was something else that gnawed at Charlie Paddock that late-October night, the thing that would haunt him and stay with him long after the Cheyenne Mountain game came and went in a season of sports unlike virtually any other in America, with stakes so high that the winning and losing seemed almost irrelevant: Which of these kids’ parents isn’t going to come home?

The Department of Defense has identified 935 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday: FUNKE, Kane M., 20, Lance Cpl., Marines; Vancouver, Wash.; First Marine Division. MORRISON, Nicholas B., 23, Lance Cpl., Marines; Carlisle, Pa.; Second Marine Division. SANTORIELLO, Neil Anthony, 24, 1st Lt., Army; Verona, Pa.; First Infantry Division. —The New York Times, August 16, 2004.

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When football practice began at Fountain–Fort Carson High School in mid-August, it was obvious to head coach Mitch Johnson that the team was going to have its share of growing pains this season. The 2003 team had made it to the quarterfinals of the state playoffs, but only two players with any sustained playing experience were returning. He knew he had big holes to fill with the departure of linemen Jerry McWilliams and Cory York, wide receiver Jerod Ermel, and quarterback Ryan Walker. But he also knew he had other things to deal with, things far more important than how to defend against such upcoming opponents as Rampart and Widefield. The year before, he had let Cory York leave practice whenever he got a satellite call from his mother or stepfather. He had watched the mood of Jerry McWilliams fluctuate with the volume of e-mails from his mother, as he spent part of his junior and senior years shuttling between families who had offered to care for him while his mom was in Iraq. The e-mails were precious, but far from adequate—they conveyed pain and love, and the frustration of being a parent when, for a year at least, you could not possibly be a parent, no matter how many words you typed into Yahoo. They conveyed her guilt about not being there when he applied for college football scholarships, her gentle admonition to send his grandparents a thank-you note and to make sure to order a five-by-seven graduation picture for them, her plea for a “better relationship and Don’t use profanity with me,” followed by this:

Please write me soon I miss you very very much and I just am lonely without you guys. Another sucky christmas and I don’t get to come home yet. Please let me know what is going on …

Love you forever and always —mom

The situation for the team in 2004 was slightly different. No player had a parent currently deployed overseas. But three had a parent who would be going to Iraq once the season was over, and so the war refused to relent in this American place with its $4-a-plate fire-department BBQ Ranch Supper & Dance and its Harvest Moon Dance and its Labor Day salute to the “Grand Old Flag.” Besides Brodie Pigott and Mike Pritts and Kenneth Fisher, there were other players affected, though in different ways; defensive back André Faulkner’s mom had been assigned to training in Louisiana, which meant that the only way for André to stay in school in Fountain was to move in with a local couple, both of whom worked in the district.

Mitch Johnson had been the head football coach of the Fountain–Fort Carson Trojans since 1986, but his primary job at the school was dean of students. With his velvety, Burl Ives voice and his omnipresent bullhorn, exhorting “Here we go, people, let’s go!” as he prodded kids to get to class on time, he was the institutional memory of the school, the embodiment of what it stood for. It was Johnson who broke up the occasional fight in the school cafeteria with a little sigh of “Here we go.” It was Johnson who used his body as a shield to keep the line in order during lunch. It was Johnson who hugged kids, and supported them, and disciplined them, and always seemed to love them, even on afternoons when he looked bleary-eyed and exhausted and admitted that “they won the war.”

The school, up Jimmy Camp Road past a horse farm on one side and a rusted cattle pen on the other, looks a little like a spaceship. A curved sheet of glass in the cafeteria shows off a stunning view of Pikes Peak and the front range of the Rocky Mountains. It cost $35 million to build—no expense was spared. To a certain degree the school is a refuge, a place so physically beautiful that kids actually like going there. But it has always had something of a revolving door, with new kids of military families freshly assigned to Fort Carson suddenly in, old kids of transferred military families suddenly out.

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The school had weathered the deployments of Desert Storm and of peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Kuwait and Korea. But the emotional rhythms of the school changed forever when the second tower of the World Trade Center was hit on September 11. Before then, when only the first tower had been hit, there was still the vain prayer that what had happened was some terrible accident. But the hit to the second tower made it clear that this was no accident, that it was a terrorist attack, and that retaliation was inevitable. The school was locked down that day and Fort Carson was on high-security alert. Chaos ruled as Johnson and other administrators tried to figure out how to get the students, hundreds of whom lived on the army post, home. America would be going to war, which would mean the deployment overseas of soldiers from Fort Carson, which Johnson knew would have a profound effect on his high school.

When the news of the latest round of deployments hit Fort Carson, Johnson estimated that as many as 400 students, a third of the student population, could be affected. As far as the school administrators knew, no parent of any student had been a casualty of the war, and there was great relief in that. But the possibility of death haunted every hallway. When school counselors met with a student whose grades had started to slip, or who had thrown a punch at another student, or who had snapped at a teacher in class, one of the questions they now asked was whether the student had a parent who was in Iraq or about to be deployed.

“You see some really hurting babies,” said counselor Lonnetta Wade-White—hard-as-steel students breaking into tears once the protective coatings were peeled and Wade-White discovered they did have a parent in Iraq. Students questioned the relevance of grades when all they could think about was the possibility of a parent dying, the injustice of the military re-deploying a parent who had already served in Iraq. “When parents are going back for a second time, it doesn’t seem fair,” said Wade-White, whose husband had been career military in the air force. “But telling a kid that doesn’t help him get the reality of the situation.”

And that’s why Johnson, when he thought of the students at his school—what so many had gone through and what so many were about to go through—said of them, “They just don’t live in a dreamworld here. They deal with a lot of things that a lot of American youths don’t deal with.”

When Kenneth Fisher arrived at Fountain–Fort Carson High School at the beginning of the 2004 school year, he hadn’t played football before. Johnson, ever cognizant that a football player here today could be gone tomorrow, given that as many as 35 percent of the students were new each year, noticed that he had size and a nice frame, and immediately invited him to come out for the team. Kenneth accepted and began to prepare with the rest of the Trojans for the September 3 season opener, against Cañon City.

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Kenneth, a senior, was entering his third high school, typical of the itinerancy that defines military life. Defensive end Brodie Pigott had lived in seven different places before his father was assigned to Fort Carson—Germany, Korea, Kentucky, Hawaii, South Carolina, Alaska, and Louisiana. Genevieve Hammerle-Clark had gone to 13 different schools and could list almost all of them—Fort Kobbe Elementary, in Panama; Hucrest Elementary, in Roseburg, Oregon; Meadows Elementary, in Fort Hood, Texas; Park Glen Elementary, in Fort Worth, Texas; Würzburg Elementary, in Wüerzburg, Germany; Jackson Elementary, in Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Mahaffey Middle School, in Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Stevenson High School, in Livonia, Michigan; Roseburg High School, back in Oregon; and now Fountain–Fort Carson.

Kenneth had spent 9th grade and part of 10th at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. Then he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, to live with his grandparents when his mother was assigned to duty in Korea. When she came back, in June of 2004, she had yet another new assignment—to Fort Carson. Kenneth didn’t want to move a third time, in his senior year, to a school where he didn’t know a soul. What’s more, he had gotten used to life in his mother’s absence during her year in Korea—the full use of her Montero Sport, nobody hovering over him and questioning how he spent the money he made at the Foot Action.

A parent’s return from assignment overseas was a little bit like a parachute drop into unknown territory. Kenneth and his mother had clashed at first, she wanting him to obey her rules now that she was back, and he telling her that in her absence he had been forced to grow up and be independent. “You haven’t been here. You’re trying to come back and make me change the way I’ve been doing stuff for a year,” he told her. “I’m not the same person you left behind. I’m not a little kid anymore.” When they drove from Shreveport to Colorado, the trip was almost unbearable. He was upset and made no effort to hide it, his stance clear and firm: I can’t believe you pulled me out of school again.

But the bond of mother and son had since been reforged, moving their relationship beyond the questions of curfew and money. (Like the time he bought a pink Yankees hat for $25 and she insisted that he take it back because it was a waste of money and he said he didn’t want to take it back, even if it was a waste of money, because he had paid for it out of his own pocket, although he also had to confess that he had never actually worn it.) Even in the midst of their re-adjustment, however, Kenneth knew that their newfound connection would be temporary, that his mother, a staff sergeant specializing in aviation operations, would be deployed again, this time to Iraq.

Antoinette Fisher had already missed her son’s 12th, 15th, and 17th birthdays. She had missed her daughter Joanna’s first, second, sixth, and seventh birthdays, and now would miss her eighth as well. Her deployment, at the beginning of March 2005, meant she might miss Kenneth’s high-school graduation, a possibility that brought tears to her eyes. “Just missing that is hard,” she said, not to mention missing the other things in Kenneth’s life and the lives of her other three children, the small things that most parents take for granted—making sure that the little ones had their hair brushed before they left for school; taking the youngest, Alex, to Boy Scouts; standing in the bedroom doorway and watching her kids sleep.

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Then there were the logistics she faced as a 40-year-old single parent. How to keep the routines of her four children intact while she was away. How to do the best she could do when there was no best way. She knew she could not keep them together during her one-year absence, so she would be sending her two youngest children to Shreveport to live with her mom. As for Kenneth, she had decided that at the age of 18 he would become the head of the household for several months, remaining in the town house at Fort Carson until the end of the school year and taking care of his 15-year-old sister, Jocelyn. At least that way he wouldn’t have to move to his fourth high school in the middle of his senior year. She made arrangements for Jocelyn’s father to regularly check in on the two children. And there were friends on the post whom she trusted to look in on them.

She had weighed the pros and cons in her mind, and this was the best she could do. She didn’t want pity for that. Nobody had forced her to join the army full-time seven years ago, when she signed up after having held as many as three jobs at once. The army gave her family financial stability, put food on the table.

Kenneth welcomed the challenge of running the house and caring for his sister, felt ready to rise to the responsibility. He listed the duties that would become his once his mother went away: “Take care of the home. Take care of the bills. Take care of myself. Take care of my sister. Make sure there is food in the fridge. Cut the grass. Keep the whole house clean. Stay in school. Manage the money.

Coach Johnson saw in Kenneth Fisher the kind of player who complements any football team regardless of experience or skill—low-maintenance and undemanding. He tried to work him into special-team situations, but Fisher didn’t get a lot of playing time. The inexperience of the team meant a struggle from the very beginning. In the opener, in early September, a 7–0 loss to Cañon City, the Trojans were beset by six illegal-motion penalties against the offense. The second game, the Pikes Peak Conference opener, against Pine Creek, on September 10, resulted in another loss, 10–0.

As he reviewed the games on film, Johnson fretted over the fundamentals, breakdowns in blocking and tackling, not to mention the continued epidemic of motion penalties, 10 in only two games. “We must have a great week of fundamentals if we expect to win,” wrote Johnson in his weekly handout to players, this one before the third game of the season, against Pueblo East. “Each of you must accept the responsibility to refine your skills at each individual position then mix them into the pot called T.E.A.M.”

But even in the early gestation of the season, there were some positive rumblings. André Faulkner, who like Kenneth Fisher had never played football before, had the makings of a smart and quick defensive back. He was a good basketball player, so the coaches told him to think of it as basketball on grass. Charlie Paddock, in spite of an injury that had caused him to miss much of the 2003 season, had come back at both tight end and outside linebacker. Perhaps the nicest surprise on the team had been at the defensive-end spot, where Brodie Pigott ranked second on the team in tackles and assists with a combined nine after two games.

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His parents, Donald and Cathy, felt not only pride in his success but also relief, since Brodie hadn’t been sure he even wanted to play football after a rocky year on the junior varsity. The thought mortified his parents, given their own football roots—Donald had been a high-school football star back in Tylertown, Mississippi, and Cathy had been a cheerleader in nearby Brookhaven. They both loved football, lived for it. When it became clear that Brodie was serious about not playing in 2004, Cathy Pigott rented Remember the Titans in the hopes of re-invigorating him. She juiced up the volume in the town house they maintained in Fort Carson. “Look at that hit!” she cried. “Listen to that sound!”

Brodie took it all in. “Mom, you’re crazy.”

But he finally did relent after Coach Johnson spoke to him and coaxed him back into it with his arm-around-the-shoulder paternalism. Brodie wore the red-white-and-blue uniform of the Trojans once again, and beautiful as the sight was to Donald Pigott, there was also something bittersweet about it, given that even early in the season, Donald, a sergeant first class specializing in maintenance, had begun to count down the days to his deployment.

It was hard to believe a son could have a closer relationship with his father. They shared simpatico silences and a love of the outdoors. When Brodie was two years old, Donald covered him with bug repellent and took him fishing for seven hours in the Toledo Bend Reservoir, in Louisiana. When Brodie was a young teenager and the family was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska, Donald hoisted the boy up onto his shoulders as they hunted moose at White Mountain in 50-below temperatures. Brodie Pigott was a quiet kid, a yes-sir-no-sir kid. At 5 feet 11 he was small for a defensive end, but he was relentless. Because he didn’t say much, he kept largely to himself what he felt about his father’s going to war.

His teammate Mike Pritts, whose father, Mike, 36, was a master sergeant in special operations, was the same way. “You have to pull teeth to get him to say anything,” his mother, Beth, said of him. His whole persona at school, from the black T-shirts to the spiked hair to the don’t-mess-with-me sneer in the cafeteria, was one of imperviousness. What he thought about his father’s going didn’t percolate to the outside, and he didn’t want to think about Iraq. He didn’t want to know what was going on, so to the extent that he could he avoided news coverage about it and created his own world of intense distraction—his art, his guitar, wrestling during the winter and football during the fall. Despite the pain in his shoulder, a pain so severe that he sometimes just collapsed on the field after a hit, he came into his own on the offensive line as the season progressed. Coach Johnson saw him mature on the football field, but the closer his father’s scheduled deployment date got, the more withdrawn Mike Pritts became. And Johnson could only imagine what was going on inside the mind of the 16-year-old, “knowing that the day was coming, and not wanting it to come, but having no control over time.”

The Department of Defense has identified 1,082 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday: BAKER, Ronald W., 34, Specialist, Army National Guard; Cabot, Ark.; 39th Support Battalion. REGNIER, Jeremy F., 22, Specialist, Army; Littleton, N.H.; First Cavalry Division. —The New York Times, October 16, 2004.

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After losing their first two games, the Trojans defeated Pueblo East, 12–7. Charlie Paddock caught a pass for 15 yards and logged 11 tackles and assists. André Faulkner had a combined 7 tackles and assists, and Brodie Pigott 4, to raise his season total to 13. Mike Pritts did a nice job at left guard and Kenneth Fisher got in a little playing time. Johnson could only hope that a corner had been turned, but the schedule was getting harder, not easier, and the Trojans lost their next three games. Their record dropped to one and five. Three home games followed after that, and the results so far were mixed: a 24–0 win over Widefield in the middle of October, a 27–0 loss to Pueblo Centennial, and now the last home game of the season, against Cheyenne Mountain.

Donald and Cathy Pigott were in the stands that night watching Brodie play. Beth and Mike Pritts were there, too. The game was going badly, with players on the defense yelling at one another after a blown assignment that had led to a touchdown. The Trojans were on their way to their seventh defeat of the season with only one game left, heart and desire no match for experience.

But Cathy Pigott thought about other things as she watched the game. With Donald next to her, their time together slipping away, she felt so proud of him for what he was about to do, vainly wishing she could go with him, help him fight his war, just as he had helped her fight hers several years earlier when she lost both her breasts to cancer while in her early 40s. Like Charlie Paddock, she looked to the American flag that night, the way it flapped in the wind, and as she watched it she realized “that for every wave of that flag, everybody had shed a tear” to keep it so fierce and free.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,122 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday: BARO, Jeremiah A., 21, Cpl., Marines; Fresno, Calif.; First Marine Division. HUBBARD, Jared P., 22, Lance Cpl., Marines; Clovis, Calif.; First Marine Division. —The New York Times, November 6, 2004.

In the handout he had worked on at home the last Sunday of October and distributed to the players that week, Mitch Johnson made it clear there was a way to salvage the season, with a win in the final game, against Sand Creek. “Seniors this is the last time that you will play H.S. football. Make the moment last by a hard fought win against the Scorpions.… How do you want to finish the season?”

With 1:22 left in the first period, Charlie Paddock responded to his coach’s challenge by catching a 27-yard TD pass from quarterback Ben Valdez. The try for two points failed, making the score 6–0. In the second quarter, Sand Creek quarterback John Olsen connected with hotshot wide receiver Tyler Carson for a 45-yard score, tying the game. The Scorpions missed their extra-point try, and the score remained 6–6.

The Scorpions and the Trojans traded the ball back and forth after that. Neither team was able to sustain much of anything, and when the Trojans got the ball on their own 20-yard line with a little more than three minutes left in the half, the odds of going 80 yards for a score were slim, given the problems the offense had all season getting into the end zone. But Travis Cronin went for 2 yards, and then Valdez scrambled for 12 and a first down, with the ball on their own 34. Brad Birks ran for 4 yards, and Adam Lozano for 11 for another first down, the ball now just inside the 50-yard line. With the clock winding down to less than a minute and the Trojans with the ball on the Scorpion 40 after another first down, Valdez dropped back to pass. He found Nick Martinez free. Martinez cradled it in and scored with 26 seconds left. This time the try for two points was good. The Trojans went into the locker room with a 14–6 lead.

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Their lead held through the second half, giving the Trojans their third win of the season. It held because of the play of André Faulkner, who intercepted a pass at a crucial moment to kill a Scorpion drive. It held because of the play of Mike Pritts, who, in some rare playing time on defense, was all over the ball and had four tackles and assists. It held because of the play of Brodie Pigott, who had 7 tackles and assists for a total of 60 on the season and was on his way to being named second-team all-conference.

Mike Pritts and Donald Pigott sat next to each other in the stands that night. They were as giddy as children as they watched their sons. Beth Pritts could see them living through their boys, as fathers invariably do. There was no better way to end the season than with a win. She also knew the thought that crossed their minds no matter how much joy they felt: Who knows what’s going to be happening to me in the next several months? As for Kenneth Fisher, he wasn’t going to lie about it—he was frustrated with the small amount of playing time he had gotten during the season. But his mother’s pride in seeing her son in his first football uniform before she left for Iraq was immense, and Kenneth knew it had been worth it to stick it out.

The win against Sand Creek was a marvelous endnote for the Trojans, an inexperienced team that had fought and persevered and seemed on its way to something even better in the season of 2005. Brodie Pigott would be back. Mike Pritts would be back. So would the quarterback Ben Valdez and running back Adam Lozano. The nucleus of something special was there, and maybe their team could realistically compete for the Pikes Peak league title, but underlying it all was the other reality for the Fountain–Fort Carson Trojans, the one that would be there for as long as America was at war.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,217 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday: HANKS, Michael W., 22, Lance Cpl., Marines; Gregory, Mich.; First Marine Division. GAVRIEL, Dimitrios, 29, Lance Cpl., Marines; New York; Second Marine Division. WEST, Phillip G., 19, Lance Cpl., Marines; American Canyon, Calif.; First Marine Division. —The New York Times, November 22, 2004.

Mike Pritts’s dad was the first to leave. By his deployment date, toward the end of November, he and his wife, Beth, had worked out much of the nitty-gritty of running the household: how to handle the money, with two carefully typed budgets for Beth to follow, since by her own admission she wasn’t very good with finances; which bills would be paid online and which ones would be automatic drafts; what to do with Qwest and Adelphia and Dodge and Toyota. The day before Mike Pritts left, both of his sons, Mike and Dylan, stayed home from school so they could be with their dad. He took them to Hooters over in the Springs, where Dylan had a hamburger and his brother a steak quesadilla.

The next morning, November 22, Mike and his wife, Beth, got up at about three and had coffee. Mike got dressed in his uniform and started putting gear into the Toyota truck he would drive by himself to meet his company. The couple had decided it would be easier for him to drive himself and have Beth pick up the truck later. There was little use in prolonging what was already so difficult. He walked up the small flight of stairs toward his sons’ bedrooms. He leaned over and kissed Mike, who was still asleep. He went into Dylan’s room and placed a note on his desk with a patch attached to it with a little pin. A bloody-mouthed skull was in the middle of the patch, and, underneath, it read, NOUS DÉFIONS, French for “We defy.” “I want you to keep my sniper patch for me while I’m gone,” Mike Pritts wrote in the note to his younger son. “Hell, you’re a better shot anyway.”

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He wanted to leave as quietly as he could. But Dylan had set his alarm clock to make sure he would wake up. He followed his dad downstairs in his pajama pants. They talked for a little bit, and Mike Pritts reiterated that he wanted his son to keep his sniper patch for him until he got home, sometime in the summer. That would have him back home in Fountain in plenty of time to see his older son play another season of football. He told Dylan to be good to Mom, and Dylan fought to be manly about it all in the way his brother was manly. The family would be able to communicate with their father by e-mail and occasional phone calls, and that would make it easier.

His dad thought Dylan would make leaving even harder than it was. But Dylan was a champ. He sat beside his dad, then hugged him. He went back to his bedroom and waved out the window. Still, Dylan was only 13. As he watched his dad leave, he couldn’t help doing what he didn’t want to do as the son of a soldier. He cried.

After Mike Pritts arrived overseas, he contacted Beth. He told her about the flight, how there had been a group of young Marines on board. They were nice enough, he said, but it had been hard to talk with them, because he knew where they were going and what they were getting into. A phrase had come to mind as he looked at them, and it bothered him so much because they were such nice kids, but still he couldn’t get it out of his head: Dead man walking. It’s what he thought about as he looked at the Marines, not much older than his own son.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,270 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday: BEHNKE, Joseph O., 45, Cpl., Army National Guard; Brooklyn; First Battalion, 258th Field Artillery. EGGERS, Kyle A., 27, Staff Sgt., Army; Euless, Tex.; Second Infantry Division. —The New York Times, December 8, 2004.

For Donald Pigott, the final week leading up to his deployment was the hardest that he had ever gone through, knowing that he would be leaving his family behind. “The main thing I tried to accomplish was to never leave their side,” he later wrote in an e-mail. “I didn’t want to be separated any more than I had to.”

Shortly before Donald left Fort Carson, his wife, Cathy, wrote him a letter on a piece of white muslin, saying she would love him forever, and Donald attached it to his bulletproof vest with black duct tape so it would be with him wherever he went in Iraq. He wasn’t gung-ho about going, and it wasn’t just his wife and son he was leaving, but also their daughter, Jessie, who was at a junior college in Mississippi. But he had pride in his army uniform and the duty that went with it. “It’s not that he wanted to go,” said Cathy, “but he did not like the question ‘Have you been to Iraq?’ Nobody wants to go to war, nobody, but you have to love your country. And we both love our country.”

On December 8, Cathy and Donald awoke at two a.m. in their three-bedroom house at Fort Carson. They got dressed and walked down the staircase, past the little framed embroidery that said, HOME IS WHERE THE ARMY SENDS YOU, hanging on the white wall. They went past the bookcase that held the family pictures, Donald as a high-school football player, Cathy as a cheerleader. Tracker, their beloved yellow Labrador, got up from his chair in the family room, perhaps sensing something momentous.

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Donald walked into his son’s room, with its football trophies from his seasons with the Schofield Buffaloes and the Fort Wainwright Cowboys and the fishtank that had no fish and the little plaques of football greats Deion Sanders and Barry Sanders and Brett Favre. He kissed his son on the top of his head, and his son didn’t stir, and then Cathy and Donald got into their Sierra truck and drove a short distance to a parking lot off Wetzel Avenue flanked by a series of low-slung buildings. Cathy noticed the lights as she went into the parking lot, not white but a mix of orange and yellow, and she found them surreal. She saw the long, orderly line of duffel bags that seemed to stretch forever. There was chaos—soldiers preparing for the long trip, families who had lived on the post now moving. But even in the chaos it was so very quiet.

Cathy watched a soldier run across the front lawn of a building with his child, and she saw many young soldiers huddled with young wives holding babies in their arms. She hoped that her husband’s deployment to Iraq would be his last; he would have his 20 years in, and he would retire. They had done their time, and they would move to Mississippi, where they would get their own house, and the first thing Cathy would do would be to stay up all night and paint the walls every color she could think of, since, she said, she was not allowed to paint the walls of the military housing where she lived any color other than white.

The military life was different now. As long as there was a war, it would be different, and nobody could say with certainty when this war would end. As Cathy watched the young soldiers with their young wives and their little babies, she wondered how many times this scene would be repeated if those families decided to stay in the army, dedicate their lives to it, as she and her husband had elected to do.

Cathy parked and sat inside the Sierra truck for a few minutes. She could have stayed for breakfast, but she didn’t want her husband to have to linger anymore in her sadness. She told him she would love him forever, just as she had written to him on the white muslin. She told him never to let his guard down, and she kissed him and hugged him and then drove back home. When she saw Brodie later on that morning, she mentioned how he hadn’t awoken when his father kissed him good-bye.

“You didn’t even know your daddy kissed you on your head,” she said to him.

But Brodie did know, his silence the only way he could handle the final touch of his father before he went off to war.